


finally cleaning, cleaning my closet

by dee_lirious



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, Father-Daughter Relationships, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi, Gen, References to Canon Torture/Genocide (Non-Explicit), Ruminating on the Concept of Forgiveness, as my friend put it: "to owe nothing but still want something but not want to want the thing"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29203173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dee_lirious/pseuds/dee_lirious
Summary: Understandably, Leia does not react well, the first time Luke tells her that their father’s ghost is in the room.
Relationships: Bail Organa & Leia Organa, Leia Organa & Anakin Skywalker
Comments: 18
Kudos: 110





	finally cleaning, cleaning my closet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anabundanceofjoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anabundanceofjoy/gifts).



> Dedicated to Carrie Fisher, who I've been thinking extra hard about lately, and M, as always.

Understandably, Leia does not react well, the first time Luke tells her that their father’s ghost is in the room. 

“What in the _hells.”_ She spits a string of curses, eyes darting suspiciously around the otherwise empty hangar, her shoulders curling in defensively. She swallows against the sense-memory: of a needle in her neck, of sharp burning pain, of the unrelenting rasp of breathing through a vocoder, of the shine of lights against black plastisteel, of Admiral Tarkin’s cruel smirk in her periphery as the debris of her homeworld drifts through the vacuum of space.

Luke's pained grimace doesn’t help, nor do his hasty, wide-eyed apologies.

“Shut up,” Leia snaps, rubbing at her temple. There are several things she almost says: I don't want to hear about him ever again. He's not my father; I had a perfect father who I loved and who he murdered. I don’t know how you can even tolerate his memory.

None of them are fully true—there’s a dark, niggling curiosity about Vader that Leia has been carrying around, stuck like a splinter, impossible to remove without pain. She’s simply avoided touching it, letting it fester. By the sympathetic way Luke looks at her sometimes, he knows; can probably feel it coming off her in waves on particularly bad days. Although she’s not proud of it, the soft way he steps around the subject only makes her angrier. 

She loves Luke. He’s the only family that she has left. Her best friend, probably her soulmate, if such things exist. But their parentage—the shared and the separate—will forever be a gulf between them. They've been trying to bridge the distance in the months since Endor: slow but steady work; tender, difficult and cathartic. Already, they’ve pooled their memories together: about Bail and Breha; about Owen and Beru; about Obi-Wan. One night, over shots of some truly egregious homebrew, they’d huddled in her quarters with the lights off and binge-watched as many bland, boring Senatorial holovids of Senator Padme Amidala as they could before they’d passed out on top of one another.

But for all their progress, Leia fears that the subject of Anakin Skywalker—of _Vader_ —will forever be too far a gap to jump. 

“Just...don’t, okay?” Leia says finally, avoiding meeting Luke’s piercing, pleading eyes. “And if...if he’s _here_...just. Don’t tell me. Or, tell me so I can be somewhere else.” 

Luke makes an aborted move towards her like he wants to protest, but Leia hasn’t perfected her glare over a lifetime in politics for nothing, because he relents with a sigh. “Alright.” Leia doesn’t miss that he says it like a placation, and not a promise.

-

Luke mostly lets it lie, for a time. Sometimes he’ll glance to some empty, person-sized space or corner and look at Leia with an expression that she’s privately dubbed “guilty constipation” before abruptly excusing himself.

Sometimes Leia finds herself staring at the same spots afterwards, her jaw clenched for a long time, her thoughts scattered loose.

“He’s sorry,” Luke says on a few rare occasions, quietly and carefully, like a professional translator smoothing over the rough patches of someone else’s indelicate words. “You have no idea how much.”

Leia never knows how to respond to these moments. Feels angry that, despite Luke’s good intentions, she’s being forced over and over into a corner—to give a reaction to the ghost of a man to whom she owes less than nothing. To be reminded of the permanent tie she has to the perpetrator of her peoples’ genocide. To never be free of the dark legacies she carries.

“ _Good,”_ is all she can say. 

-

In the wake of the war and the knowledge of her Force-sensitivity, Leia allows Luke to train her in the patchwork Jedi training he’s putting together—reciting the knowledge out loud helps him to learn it as well; to strain some sort of coherence out of the loose, often contextless pieces. He runs through the basic katas with her, and lectures her on metaphysical theory and philosophy. He walks her through the building of her lightsaber—an elegant thing, which she’s proud of and feels right in her hands, though never as natural as Luke implies it should. Mostly, they meditate. A lot.

Leia is well-versed in patience, for all that it doesn’t come naturally to her. Having studied as a politician’s daughter in the shady Imperial Senate, being a closely-watched royal, being a spy and agent of the Rebellion—it all taught her the virtue of poise, of quiet, of listening. Reflection is an extension of those skills turned inward. More difficult, though, and occasionally painful.

But it does help to calm her mind, allowing her to connect deeply with the Force. Its waves and eddies feel like warm ocean water around her, its big steady movements natural and comforting. Over time, Leia finds that she can meditate for longer periods of time without fidgeting, and thinks she understands a little about why Luke is so determined to preserve this aspect of their legacy. For all the mysticism and conflict in the Order’s history, there’s this too: culture, empathy, connection. Light. 

-

The first time Leia sees her birth father’s face, she doesn’t recognize him at all. 

How could she? The ghost of Anakin Skywalker looks precisely nothing like Darth Vader had in life, which she somehow hadn't expected. (He doesn’t _feel_ like Vader either, which is more difficult to accept.)

Supposedly, the true Anakin Skywalker died the day that Vader was born. As Luke insists, Anakin and Vader are separate—the actions of one do not reflect or negate the actions of the other. _He died as Anakin,_ Luke insists with conviction, his big blue eyes full of sorrow and love. 

Leia thinks it’s a bunch of banthashit, personally, though it’s a necessary comfort that she would never take away from her brother. She knows, _believes,_ that their biological father—Skywalker or Vader, whatever name one chooses to use—was a single man, for all his power, for all the great and terrible accomplishments of his tumultuous life. Leia grew up in court, in politics, and during a war no less; she’s witnessed what people are capable of, good and bad alike. She doesn’t assume to fully grasp what the fall from Jedi to Sith entails, but it can’t be a complete erasure of the self. Choosing the Light is a constant choice, or so the old Jedi teachings say; choosing the Dark must, then, be the reflection. 

All of that said, Leia wasn’t expecting Anakin Skywalker to look like a man. A young man, at that—clearly the age he was when he fell. Younger than she and Luke are now, she’s startled to realize. (Ironically, the age the twins were when Anakin—Vader—died for good. It must be some kind of ironic symmetry, she thinks, that he spent exactly half of his life in the Light and half in the Dark.)

Anakin's ghost, glowing an eerie bluish light, stares at her in silence for a long time, his eyes tracing her face intently for an age before he seems to realize that she can see him, finally. He opens his mouth. Closes it, opens it again.

“Leia.” He whispers her name as if he doesn’t believe he’s allowed to say it. Reverent.

Leia closes her eyes, feels her hands clench into fists without her input. Gods _dammit,_ but he sounds like _a man,_ and not a machine. His voice is softer than she could’ve ever dreamed, if she had allowed herself to wonder. (There must still be some holo footage of the Jedi General Skywalker out there somewhere, but she hasn’t dared to look.)

Leia takes a deep breath in, holds it for a count of five, and lets it go. A centering ritual, like Luke had taught her, though her results are often hit-or-miss. When she opens her eyes, she’s almost expecting him to be gone. Almost wishing for it.

He’s not. 

“Hello, Leia—”

“ _No,”_ Leia says. Spits it, really, with enough force to surprise even herself. “You have no right coming to me as a man, when you spent my entire life choosing to be a monster.”

The ghost’s jaw snaps shut, pain flashing across his face. 

_Good,_ she thinks, venomously, and then, between one blink and another, he’s gone. 

Leia scrambles to her feet, her whole body jittery with adrenaline, and stands frozen, feeling the Force tremble and whirl around her. She tries, and fails, to breathe the excess emotion out of her body. _We all feel anger and fear and pain,_ the memory of Luke’s voice says, _You must accept the emotion for what it is: a temporary gift, borrowed from the Force. Release it, knowing that it has served its purpose._

What’s the purpose of any of this, she thinks wildly. What can come from confronting the past this way, except her continued torture?

She needs an outlet. Willing her hands steady, Leia reaches for her comm. 

“Han, meet me in the gym, please.” She’ll goad him into a hand-to-hand session, she thinks. If she’s lucky, Chewie will be around for round two.

-

Life goes on. 

The New Republic establishes itself more firmly, the remnants of the Imperial forces pushed out of the Core. Leia is formally given a set of apartments and offices on Coruscant, cementing her official role as the Senator representing the Alderaanian system. It’s a bittersweet achievement, and she spends the move-in period flipping through old holos of Bail from her childhood, trying to remember the exact cadence of his voice when he’d tell her stories about the Senate from before the Clone War; the exact wording of all the advice he’d ever gifted to her. Increasingly, the details slip through the cracks of her memory. 

Her Jedi training becomes less and less of a priority, a casualty of all of their escalating political responsibilities. Luke, too, is asked to travel more and more, unable to refuse requests for his aid and mediation. Even in systems that had openly distrusted the Jedi Order during the Old Republic’s reign, it seems, the prospect of meeting a living, breathing Jedi in the wake of the Empire’s bleak reign is too enticing to ignore.

Leia continues her lightsaber practice alone, though, and finds that meditation and breathing exercises come in handy when dealing with the tediums and frustrations as the New Republic takes its first stumbling steps. The Force on Coruscant doesn’t feel like anywhere else— apparently another incentive for Luke to be off-planet so much. Leia doesn’t find it overwhelming the way he does, though. It’s _intense,_ certainly—could be nothing else with a trillion sentients so densely packed onto one planet, all their hopes and fears and joys layered over one another like sands in an hourglass—but not in a bad way, most of the time. To Leia it’s simply reassuring, and, more importantly, different enough from her memories of Alderaan—lush green and blue, the bleached-white stone of the palace, her Mama’s lush satin skirts—not to sting her.

She doesn’t see any more ghosts for months, but it can’t last. There’s some twisty thing in the back of her head waiting with baited breath for the other shoe to drop.

When it does, it’s in the form of Ben Kenobi.

She’s supposed to be looking over some gargantuan sheaf of policy before her meeting in the morning, but she finds her gaze caught on the dark silhouette of the former Imperial Palace, struggling, as she often does, to picture it as the Jedi Temple it once was. Luke had been devastated to learn of how much of the Order had been lost forever—the Archives, artifacts, nearly all of the architectural details—a millennia of history eradicated in less than twenty-three years. 

It’s unoccupied these days, as the task of clearing it of the Emperor’s dark presence has been a slow, tedious, and even dangerous process. 

“I always thought Palpatine had horrendous taste in interior decor,” says an accented voice from Leia’s sofa. She whirls around, reaching for a blaster she’s not carrying and fumbling her saber’s hilt instead.

Obi-Wan looks the way he did when she saw him last, in the moments before his death, right down to the sand-worn tunics. Only, his eyes are brighter and less weary, as if he’s lost a great weight from his shoulders. 

Some months after the war ended, she’d discovered that Bail had left a deeply encoded file in Artoo’s memory banks for her, one that even the astromech didn’t know about. In it, he detailed the fall of the Old Republic, from his point of view, including the twenty-year plot to keep Luke and Leia hidden—him in obscurity, her in plain sight. “I love you, my daughter,” it had ended.

The depth and duration of their plan is still boggling. That her father could’ve kept so many crucial secrets for her entire life casts new light on the man she was in her memory. But even moreso, Leia still can’t wrap her head around the sacrifice Obi-Wan had made: twenty years alone with his grief in the unforgiving desert, trusting— _hoping—_ that it would amount to anything at all. 

“My only hope,” Leia greets him, unprepared for the sudden overflow of tears in her own eyes.

“Hello, my dear,” he says, just as softly. 

They don’t say much to one another that night, but afterwards Leia smiles as she prepares for bed, and sleeps without nightmares. 

-

Eventually, as she’d dreaded and anticipated in equal measure, he appears to her again. 

“Hello,” Anakin says. Tentative, unsure. Pained. He’s sitting in a mediation pose to mirror her own, his translucent hands tucked into his translucent robes, the picture of a fierce and proper Jedi Knight.

Leia briefly dithers over what to call him—not _Father,_ of course, but she doesn’t think she can bring herself to say his name aloud either. She could call him _Darth_ or _Vader,_ which she’s positive will hurt him and bring her some fleeting moment of spiteful vindication, but it’d be a double-edged blade. The reminders hurt her just as much.

“...Hello,” she manages, finally, flatly. 

“I'm sorry,” he says, on an exhale, like the floodgates suddenly opening. “I know it isn’t worth anything to you, Leia, but I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything I did, and I'm sorry for this, now. I’ll go, and you won’t have to see me again.”

There's a lump of pressure rising in her throat, which Leia pushes down with great force. She won’t cry in front of him—she didn’t do that when he was alive and she won’t capitulate to his ghost.

Her voice is clipped when she says, “It's fine,” which is, of course, a lie. “We may as well get this over with.”

He flinches as if she’d struck him, and Leia brushes aside the tangled knot of victory and guilt she feels at the sight. 

“Whatever you need from me, Leia, I'll give it.” His face and voice are so determined. _Resolute._ He’s so young and handsome; so heroic—he looks so believable. _Trustworthy._ The thought makes her _furious._

Leia hates his big sad eyes, which are the same color as her brother’s and the same shape as her own. She hates his soft, gentle voice, the guilt and contrition on his face, as if he’s ready for her condemnation, already accepting of her hatred of him. 

Abruptly, she tosses aside all those careful, rational thoughts of Anakin and Vader as the same person— _fuck that,_ she thinks as the fury rises in her chest. She wants to be facing _Darth Vader_ now, not this tragic-faced boy. She wants to see the mask, hear the respirator, feel his unrelenting gloved hands looming over her—it would justify the way she feels trapped by his mere presence, even knowing that he can’t touch her.

Why should she have to make stilted amends with whoever this _stranger_ is, when all she wants to do is point her blaster in Vader’s face and pull the trigger? What could be more satisfying than making him hurt—the way that she still hurts, when she remembers anew that she’ll never set foot on Alderaan again. She’ll never again sit with Breha and her Aunts and listen to their mischievous gossip; never again saunter into Bail’s office and plop herself down onto her favored spot on his comfortable old couch and trade jokes with her father and let him make her a cup of tea that they both know she won’t drink. This man and his beloved, twisted Empire took all of that from her, practically on a whim, even though it had been her home, the warm center of her heart in the whole of the universe.

“I don't _need_ anything from _you,”_ Leia spits, though she knows immediately it’s wrong. She only _wishes_ that she didn’t. But the things she needs from him are ephemeral and impossible: to turn back time, to remove the memory of him, to remove the _knowledge_ of him, to not be the source of her fear, to not be the source of _her._

She pictures, not for the first time, his hated blood in her veins: thick and black, distinct. But it’s only wishful thinking, that she would be able to isolate the parts of him that reside in her; could cut them out cleanly and be left with some sturdy, new version of herself that would be bearable to live with.

Anakin, to his credit, is smart enough to understand at least some version of her dark thoughts through the severity and weight of her glare. His face twists with pain, and frustration, and self-loathing.

They sit in intolerable silence, until the feeling of his eyes on her face becomes too much. He looks at her like he’s memorizing her, like he’s analyzing every plane of her face. It’s both too intimate and too distant.

“I’m not her,” Leia snaps. “I’m not your wife, for all that I look like her.” She’s probably spent hours looking at her birth mother’s face by now; how her parents had excused away the resemblance is a mystery, in hindsight.

Anakin looks startled. “...That’s not what I was thinking,” he ventures. Clears his throat, which seems like something you wouldn’t have to do when you’re non-corporeal. Leia narrows her eyes at him. “Actually, I was thinking that you look like my mother,” he says, which is enough to surprise her away from whatever her next poisonous retort would’ve been. 

“Your mother,” Leia repeats, dumbly.

“Yeah. Uh, her name was Shmi,” Anakin offers. “I dunno if anyone’s told you guys about her.”

She shakes her head. No one has. Probably there’s no one left alive who even could. 

Leia realizes that she’s never given much thought to the Skywalker side of her heritage, despite hearing stories from Luke about their aunt and uncle. It shames her to admit it, but Leia has a hard time grasping what her twin’s life—and, she supposes, Anakin’s life—on Tatooine must have been like. She’s spent most of her adolescence and adulthood protesting against atrocities such as slavery which are such an integrated part of life in the Outer Rim, but she still has difficulties really _understanding._ Her own upbringing was simply so starkly different, so much more privileged, in nearly every way.

“...What was she like,” Leia says, after another very long silence. It’s not quite a question. She doesn’t think she could bear to ask Anakin a genuine question, to offer him even the kind of surface-level trust needed to give him that momentary power over her. Leia pictures her heart and her mind protected by layers of thick durasteel, armored and impenetrable.

Slowly, as if savoring every moment, Anakin tells her about the woman who was her grandmother by birth. Born into slavery, with a soft but sturdy presence in the Force, warm and loving despite the harsh circumstances of her life—she was Anakin’s entire world for nine years. “She was the smartest person I ever knew, I think,” Anakin says, sadly. “And the best.”

Leia absorbs the memory, her heart clenching in her chest. “Why couldn’t I have talked to her, then?” she asks bitterly, the plaintive question pouring out before she can second-guess the thought. 

It’s all so _unfair._ She’s lost so much: family, friends, countless fellow Rebels who’d given their lives for the slim hope of a better future. Her planet obliterated, her entire culture turned to gruesome rubble. And of all the countless people that she’d give _anything_ to speak with again, to gain some sliver of closure with—it’s this man in front of her, a hated spectre, the cause of so much of her bottomless grief.

Any enthusiasm Anakin had tenuously gathered while speaking seems to drain out of him, like water through a sieve.

 _Good,_ Leia thinks once again, but it’s getting late, and it lacks conviction.

-

“How can you forgive him?” Leia had asked Obi-Wan’s ghost, eventually. She didn’t have to specify who she meant. “After everything he did, _to you,_ and now you’re—what? Living with his ghost, in the Force?”

Ben hummed, that placid, tilted smile on his face as he stroked his beard. “It’s not as if we’re sharing a dormitory,” he’d chuckled, but Leia hadn’t been impressed by his flippancy.

“Everything he took from you,” she’d hissed, “and because he felt regret for the last few minutes of his life, it’s all just _forgiven?_ He doesn’t deserve it!” 

Obi-Wan had sighed, and sent her a soothing touch through the Force, akin to a firm hand on her shoulder.

“Forgiveness is not about the other person, young one,” he’d said, each word so deliberate that Leia couldn’t help but commit them to memory. “It is about _you,_ and what you can afford to carry. Perhaps your father has earned redemption; perhaps he has not—I accepted long ago that such things are beyond my ability to decide, and yours. 

“What I know, Leia, is this: one day, I had to put my agony down. I simply could not keep it with me any longer, and still remain myself.”

-

“Whatever you’re looking for from me, you won’t get it. We’re not family. We were enemies; now we’re nothing.” _I_ want _us to be nothing,_ she corrects bitterly in the safety of her head, behind her mental shields. 

Visibly shaken, Anakin twists his hands in the sleeves of his cloak, voice disorientingly meek when he insists, “I don’t want—I don’t _deserve_ anything from you. I know that, Leia. I just want to…” he struggles, clearly trying to choose the right words. Leia hates that she’s allowing it, perversely curious despite her heart’s frightened hammering.

“I want—I hoped. That I could, could try to _fix_ —”

They both realize it’s the wrong word at the same moment. Anakin snaps his mouth shut. Leia feels the white-hot anger jolt up her spine at—at the _audacity_ of it; the sheer _arrogance._

“Oh, you want to _fix it,”_ Leia hisses. She’s still sitting, has been sitting this whole time, her legs in a tense lotus position and her back ramrod straight. She tightens up further, feeling like a viper ready to strike, hungry for blood. “Tell me, _Darth,_ how many people did you torture in your life? Not just me, certainly. How many homes did you burn, how many daughters did you leave fatherless? _Not just me, certainly._

“Will you appear to them as well, every other girl whose life you ruined—you must be planning to, because I _know_ you cannot think that you have some special obligation to me! Whatever blood we share, it was meaningless when you decided to hurt me, and you must be _insane_ to think it would mean anything _now._ ”

Anakin’s head is bowed, his shoulders scrunched up as he weathers her blows. 

“You may be _Luke’s_ father,” Leia says, hearing the dangerous tremor in her voice that immediately precedes tears and pushing angrily on anyway, “But _my_ father was named _Bail Organa.”_

The noise Anakin makes is muffled in his hands, but no less gut-wrenching in the resulting silence. It’s an animal thing, the depth of his loss—the loss he earned. The loss he chose for over two decades, until he didn’t. 

Distantly, Leia recognizes that she doesn’t feel satisfaction or justice at his pain, only a matching feeling of loss, and some reluctant sense of pity. The anger drains out of her all at once. 

She momentarily pictures what could have been—some intangible, fantastical galaxy in which she’d been held by her birth mother more than once. Where she was allowed to grow up side by side with Luke; where she could look at the face of the ghost in front of her and feel something simpler, something less caustic.

The absence of that kinder reality is paradoxically heavy. So, too, are her own fury and upset, wedged tight around her. When did that happen? How long has she been draping herself with the weight of the unchangeable past? How does she get them _off?_ Leia chokes against a sob, helpless, and swipes jerkily at her face.

Anakin moves as if to reach out to her, seemingly forgetting that he can’t. Leia flinches, and he shrinks back. 

“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Leia,” Anakin pleads, miserable. 

“ _I’m not afraid of you!"_ Leia snaps, surprised to discover that it's the truth. Darth Vader, as traumatic a memory as he is for her, is _dead._ She’d felt it, in the Force, when he killed the Emperor, and again when he himself had died. It had been the most satisfying moment of her life, the absolute certainty that they’d _won,_ that all their desperate gambles had paid off at last. This man in front of her—this _shade_ —can’t hurt her, even if he wants to, which she knows he doesn’t. She _knows_ it.

“I’m afraid,” Leia says, each word fired like a wild blaster shot, defiant even as her face twists up in agony, “that someday I’ll forget my Papa’s face, and I’ll never stop having nightmares about yours.”

They stare at one another, across the cold, anguished chasm between them. It’s immovable and irrevocable. _Unnegotiable._

Leia lets herself be the first to lower her gaze. “Obi-Wan was right,” she sighs.

“...He usually is,” Anakin admits quietly.

Despite her own insistence that Anakin and Vader are the same man, she had been looking for some way to separate them, so that she could reconcile the Jedi Knight against the Darth. As if she could separately weigh all of her father’s virtues and sins, and calculate a final score that would mean something. 

But just as Ben had said, she can’t be judge and juror to the state of another’s soul. She can only try to manage her own heart. 

...It’s also very late, she realizes.

Anakin seems to realize it as well, because he exhales shakily, and says, “I should let you rest.”

Leia nods and moves to stand, wincing at the stiffness and tension in her joints. Starts to move toward the doorway to her sleeping chambers, and hesitates. Turns back to the glowing form on the floor. 

“I’m not comfortable with you showing up like this, but…” she can’t believe she’s saying it, and almost doesn’t finish the thought. “Maybe. Some other time. We can… talk. Again.” 

_Perhaps not entirely unnegotiable,_ she thinks. 

Leia used to imagine herself with black hair; with almond shaped eyes and warm, golden skin. She’d known she was not born to her parents and jealously coveted the physical things which would signify her as their daughter: she wore royal white like Breha at every opportunity, and adopted Bail’s precise posture. _You are certainly your parents’ daughter,_ people would say to her, sometimes, and it always triggered a rush of accomplishment. 

For all that she doesn’t carry any of his features on her face, the voice in Leia’s head is Bail’s: the way he’d sounded when he’d been pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

She doesn’t linger on Anakin’s expression as she leaves—the raw shock; the warring hope and fear so strong she can practically taste it. 

It’s enough that, when Leia shuts the bedroom door behind her, she finds that she’s still whole, even though she’s left a sizable portion of her anger out there, dissipating in her sitting room.

Perhaps, she thinks, it’ll be gone by morning. 

  
  


end.

**Author's Note:**

> The lack of Leia and Anakin exploration was itching at me, so I needed to channel my own father issues into my most beloved, bestest girl.
> 
> Title is from “Bad Blood” by Joy Oladokun, a song which reminds me of Skywalkers and their nonsense. ([here's my very self-indulgent leia playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0yu2TUDmQhx9TOKOKXvBBo?si=61dfb6f362dc4e43))
> 
> Forgiving someone who’s hurt you in some irreparable way is hard—on both parties. There’s never a neat solution, something that can perfectly balance justice and redemption. I wanted to make sure that Anakin’s sins aren’t excused or diminished in any way—while also casting some sympathy on him. It’s a tough line to walk.
> 
> Was thinkin' a lot about how the _Resolute_ was the name of Anakin’s ship during the Clone War, and _The Hero Without Fear_ was his nickname amongst the public. 🙃
> 
> (Absolutely ignored sequel era stuff while writing this. Still haven’t watched the sequel trilogy, and I like to pretend it never happens. I tried not to blatantly contradict it, but only did the bare minimum of Wookiepedia-surfing.)
> 
> You can find [me](https://dee-lirious.tumblr.com/) and [this fic](https://dee-lirious.tumblr.com/post/642222677500805120/fic-finally-cleaning-cleaning-my-closet-leia) on tumblr.


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